90 FICTION THE CHINESE LOBSTER. T HE proprietors of the Orient Lo- tus alternate frenetic embellish- ment WIth periods of lassitude and letting go. Dr. Himmelblau knows this because she has been coming here for quick lunches, usually solitary, for the last seven years or so. She chose it be- cause it was convenient-it is near all her regular stopping places: the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the British Museum-and because it seemed un- pretentious and quiedy comfortable. She likes its padded seats, even though the mock leather is split in places. She can stack her heavy book bags beside her and rest her bones. The window onto the street has been framed in struggling cheese plants for as long as she can remember. They grow denser, dustier, and livelier as the years go by. They press their cutout leaves against the glass, the old ones holly- dark, the new ones yellow and shining. The glass distorts and folds them, but they press on. Sometimes there is a tank of colored fish in the window and some- times not. At the moment there is not. You can see I bottles of soy sauce, and glass containers that dis- pense toothpicks, one by one, and chrome-plated boxes full of paper napkins, also frugally dispensed one by one. Inside the door, for the last year or so, there has been a low, square shrine, made of bright jade-green pottery, inside which sits a little brass god, or sage, in the lotus position, his comfortable belly on his comfortable knees. Small lamps and sticks of incense burn before him in bright-scarlet glass pots, and from time to time he is deco- rated with scarlet-and-gold shiny paper trappings. Dr. Himmelblau likes the color mixture, the bright blue-green and the saturated scarlet, so nearly the same weight. But she is a little afraid of the god, because she does not know who he is, and because he is obviously by A. S. Byatt really worshIpped, not just a decoration. Today there is a new object, farther inside the door, but still before the tables or the coat hangers. It is a display case, in black lacquered wood, standIng about as high as Dr. Himmelblau's waist-she is a woman of medium height-shining with newness and sparkling with polish. It is on four legs, and its lid and walls, about nine inches deep, are made of glass. It resembles cases in museums, in which you might see miniatures, or jew- els, or small ceramic objects. Dr. Himmelblau looks idly in. The display is brightly lit, and is arranged on a carpet of that fierce emerald- green artificial grass used by greengro- cers and undertakers. Around the edges, on opened shells, is a border of raw scallops, the pearly flesh dulling, the repeating half-moons of the orange- pink roe playing agaìnst the fierce green. In the middle, in the very middle, is a live lobster, flanked by two live crabs. All three, in parts of their bodies, are in feeble perpetual mo- tion. The lobster, slowly in this unbreathable element, moves her long feelers and the little claws on the ends of her legs, which cannot go forward or back. She is black, and holds out her heavy great pin- cers in front of her, shifting them slightly; they are too heavy to lift up. The great muscles of her tail crimp and contort and collapse. One of the crabs, the smaller, is able to rock itself from side to side, which it does. The crabs' mouths can be seen moving from side to side, like scissors; all three crustaceans survey the world with mobile eyes still lively on little stalks. From their mouths come a silent hissing and bubbling, a breath, a cry. The colors of the crabs are matte: brick, cream, a grape-dark sheen on the claw ends, a dingy, earthy encrus- tation on the hairy legs. The lobster was, is, and will not be blue-black and glossy. For a moment, in her bones, Dr. Him- melblau feels their painful life in the thin air. They stare but do not, she supposes, see her. She turns on her heel and walks quickly into the body of the Orient Lotus. It occurs to her that the scallops, too, are still in some sense, probably, alive. The middle-aged Chinese man-she knows them all well, but knows none of their names-meets her with a smile and takes her coat. Dr. Himmelblau tells him she wants a table for two. He shows her to her usual table and brings bowls, china spoons, and chopsticks. The Muzak starts up. Dr. Himmelblau listens with comfort and pleasure. The first time she heard the Muzak she was dismayed; she put her hand to her breast in alarm at the burst of sound; she told herself that this was not, after all, the peaceful retreat she had supposed. Her noodles tasted less succulent against the tin noise. And then, the second or the third time, she began to notice the tunes, which were happy, banal, West- ern tunes, but jazzed up and sung in what she took to be Cantonese. "Oh, what a beautiful mornin', Oh, what a beautiful day. I got a beautiful fielin Everything's goin' my way." But in in- comprehensible nasal syllables, against a zithery plink and plunk, a kind of gong, a sort of bell. It was not a song she had ever liked. But she has come to find it the epitome of restfUlness and cheerful- ness. Twang, tinkle, plink, plink. A cross-cultural object, an Occidental Ori- ent, an Oriental Western. She associates it now with the promise of delicate sa- vors, of warmth, of satisfaction. The middle-aged Chinese man brings her green tea, in the pot she likes with the litde transparent rice-grain flowers in the blue-and-white porcelain, delicate and elegant. She is early. She is nervous about the forthcoming conversation. She has never met her guest personally, though she has, of course, seen him, in the flesh and on the television screen; she has heard him lecture, on Bellini, on Titian, on Mantegna, on Picasso, on Matisse. His style is orotund and idiosyncratic. Dr. Himmelblau's younger colleagues find